With long-forgotten stories and evocative photographs, San Francisco's Lost Landmarks showcases the once-familiar sites that have faded into dim memories and hazy legends. Not just a list of places, facts, and dates, this pictorial history shows why San Francisco has been a legendary travel destination and one of the world's premier places to live and work for more than one hundred and fifty years. It not only tells of the lost landmarks, but also dishes up the flavour of what it was like to experience these past treasures.
A Tea Garden in Tivoli: American Garden Design Inspired by the Way of Tea is a guide to garden design and flower arranging woven around the story of a unique garden in the Hudson Valley of New York. "Great gardens in small spaces" is the theme. Gardens need not be Versailles-sized to be inspiring. This is an intriguing and accessible introduction to the Japanese garden aesthetic for the backyard gardener by veteran Zen and Tea student Bettina Mueller. Drawing from her decades long study of the Japanese Tea tradition where great - even legendary - gardens are small by necessity, Bettina sets out to turn her 1/8 acre backyard in the small Hudson Valley village of Tivoli, New York into a private world of beauty and tranquility. Limited edition.
Memorable children's narratives immerse readers in imaginary worlds that bring them into the story. Some of these places have been constructed in the real world--like Pinocchio's Tuscany or Anne of Green Gables' Prince Edward Island--where visitors relive their favorite childhood tales. Theme parks like Walt Disney World and Harry Potter World use technology to engineer enchanting environments that reconnect visitors with beloved fictional settings and characters in new ways. This collection of new essays explores the imagined places we loved as kids, with a focus on the meaning of setting and its power to shape the way we view the world.
Volume 1 outlines the nature and structures of illicit drug trafficking in the Caribbean. It discusses the escalating levels of social violence, crime and grinding poverty all linked to the illicit drug trade.
Gray's central thesis asserts that the Jamaican state is a form of predatory state that incorporates contradictory social forces into an arrangement that is hierarchical, often brutal and ultimately debilitating to democracy. He introduces a series of constructs to support this argument, but the more interesting and novel theses are to be found in his vivid description of the social forces that resist the predatory state and how they have carved out a modicum of autonomy based on what he describes as an elaborate value system of badness/honour.
Rao and Ibáñez develop an evaluation method that combines qualitative evidence with quantitative survey data analyzed with propensity score methods on matched samples to study the impact of a participatory community-driven social fund on preference targeting, collective action, and community decisionmaking. The data come from a case study of five pairs of communities in Jamaica where one community in the pair has received funds from the Jamaica social investment fund (JSIF) while the other has not--but has been picked to match the funded community in its social and economic characteristics. The qualitative data reveal that the social fund process is elite-driven and decisionmaking tends to be dominated by a small group of motivated individuals. But by the end of the project there was broad-based satisfaction with the outcome. The quantitative data from 500 households mirror these findings by showing that ex-ante the social fund does not address the expressed needs of the majority of individuals in the majority of communities. By the end of the construction process, however, 80 percent of the community expressed satisfaction with the outcome. An analysis of the determinants of participation shows that better educated and better networked individuals dominate the process. Propensity score analysis reveals that the JSIF has had a causal impact on improvements in trust and the capacity for collective action, but these gains are greater for elites within the community. Both JSIF and non-JSIF communities are more likely now to make decisions that affect their lives which indicates a broad-based effort to promote participatory development in the country, but JSIF communities do not show higher levels of community-driven decisions than non-JSIF communities. The authors shed light on the complex ways in which community-driven development works inside communities--a process that is deeply imbedded within Jamaica's sociocultural and political context. This paper--a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to evaluate community-driven development.
Discipleship is embodied. Formation in the Christian life is not an otherworldly exercise but one that plays out in this world, interwoven with everyday sensory experience in ordinary life. The Aesthetics of Discipleship explores this dynamic through Kierkegaard’s framing of “aesthetic existence”—the sensory experience of being “in the moment”—further developed by Bonhoeffer, as operating within a realm of freedom, encompassing not only art but play, friendship, and cultural formation. In addition to Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer, the work of Iain McGilchrist, Graham Ward, and Nicholas Wolterstorff is employed to offer a fresh perspective on discipleship, “from below”: Everyday sensory experiences are integral not only to being human but to the practice of discipleship, such that discipleship integrates aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence. Aesthetic existence unhinged from a life of faith or fueled by distorted Christendom creates and sustains aestheticized pseudorealities centered on the self. Mature aesthetic existence, however, anchored in love for God, plays a fundamental role in the Christian life, both as the incarnational celebration of being fully human, and also through the preconscious formation of imaginaries by which we live.
Beyond Buildings: Designed Spaces as Visual Persuasion is an assessment of the visual persuasiveness of designed spaces. It demonstrates that these spaces are as socially influential as speeches or advertisements are, and that an awareness of this influence provides an insight into the cultural roles of designed spaces. The book considers a diverse array of spaces ranging from pleasure gardens and parks to city parks and cities themselves, and includes assessments of the visual impact of national parks, zoological gardens, amusement parks, battlefields and monuments, and the interior spaces of buildings. Beyond Buildings is an extension of theories of persuasion and visual communication to landscape architecture and interior design. The book bases its assessments on the elements of visual literacy, as well as the elements of landscape and interior design to show that such designed spaces as gardens, parks, battlefields, and cities affect the viewer in such a way as to have social impact.
